Papers by Frederique de Vignemont
Scientific Reports, Jan 21, 2021
A tool can function as a body part yet not feel like one: Putting down a fork after dinner does n... more A tool can function as a body part yet not feel like one: Putting down a fork after dinner does not feel like losing a hand. However, studies show fake body-parts are embodied and experienced as parts of oneself. Typically, embodiment illusions have only been reported when the fake body-part visually resembles the real one. Here we reveal that participants can experience an illusion that a mechanical grabber, which looks scarcely like a hand, is part of their body. We found changes in three signatures of embodiment: the real hand's perceived location, the feeling that the grabber belonged to the body, and autonomic responses to visible threats to the grabber. These findings show that artificial objects can become embodied even though they bear little visual resemblance to the hand. Our body is the means through which we interact with the external world. Little would a brain achieve without a body to execute its commands and collect information about the environment through the sensory channels. Yet our body is not just any kind of input/output machine that executes actions and provides feedback. We have a "very special regard for just one body", such that each seems to "think of it as unique and perhaps more important than any other" 1 We are not simply aware of one body; we are aware of it as being our own body (i.e. we have a sense of bodily ownership) 2 . Throughout evolution, interactions with the environment have become more and more complex and mediated by objects that humans built and used to overcome the limitations of their bodies. Tools expand motor capabilities and allow actions that would otherwise be dangerous or impossible. There is now little doubt that tools can be incorporated: many of their properties are processed in the same way as the properties of one's limbs . But bodily ownership is that and more 6 . It requires experiencing tools as constitutive parts of one's own body. Though we manipulate dozens of tools during the day, could we actually feel that a fork, a toothbrush or a screwdriver belong to us in the same way our hands do? Here we investigate whether a tool can be processed as a body part not only at the spatial level (localization), but also at the physiological level (response to threats), and at the phenomenological level (feeling of ownership). For each measure, we assess the additional impact of motor experience with the tool. Previous studies show that even ten minutes of tool-use can deeply modify the representations of both the body and the space around it 7-15 . For example, when using a long grabber tool to retrieve objects, the arm representation is updated to reflect the functional elongation of the effector. Similarly, when using pliers, digit representations change to take into account the new morphology. Tool use also modifies the visual properties of peripersonal space, recoding far space as nearer , and enhancing the defensive monitoring of such space 18 . However, while these previous studies showed that tool use affects sensorimotor and spatial representations, they did not address whether it affects body ownership, that is, whether using a tool makes it feel more like a part of one's own body. Although we seem to have little doubt about the boundaries of our own body, it has been shown that it is relatively easy to induce the illusion of owning external fake body parts. This line of research originated with the seminal paper by Botvinick and Cohen describing what is now known as the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) . In
The Subject's Matter: Self-Consciousness and the Body
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2022
Typically, just a few seconds before being hit, one experiences a relatively primitive sense of i... more Typically, just a few seconds before being hit, one experiences a relatively primitive sense of impending collision, h l k "Th h !". Here I propose to explain the sense of impending collision in terms of amodal completion. Thanks to it, one can be visually aware of more than what one can actually see and I shall argue that this can be true not only for objects but also for dynamic events. But what mechanisms are involved in amodal completion? Do they qualify as perceptual or should we rather conceive them as being imaginative? Here I propose that there is a sense in which one can be said to have a perceptual sense of the future.
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2016
Mind the body: and exploration of bodily self-awareness
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2018
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt età la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, emanant desétablissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ouétrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Archive Electronique-Institut Jean Nicod 241 12 Hysterical Conversion The Reverse of Anosognosia? Frédérique de Vignemont IntroductIon H ysteria has been the subject of controversy for many years, with theorists arguing about whether it is best explained by a hidden organic cause or by malingering and deception. However, it has been shown that hysterical paralysis cannot be explained in any of these terms. With the recent development of cognitive psychiatry, one may understand psychiatric and organic delusions within the same conceptual framework. Here i contrast hysterical conversion with anosognosia. they are indeed remarkably similar, though the content of their respective delusions is the opposite. in hysterical paralysis, patients are not aware of their preserved ability, whereas in anosognosia for hemiplegia, patients are not aware of their disability. Four main explanations have been provided to account for anosognosia: metacognitive, attentional, motor, and motivational views. i will apply each of these accounts to hysterical paralysis and show that, at each level, hysterical conversion is the reverse of anosognosia. i will suggest that hysterical paralysis results from the interaction between attentional somatosensory amplification and affective inhibition of action. effingham felt paralyzed. He could not, as gerald receded along the lighted corridor, have lifted a finger or uttered a sound.…He was paralyzed, like a creature bitten by an insect or a snake, and lying there living, breathing, and waiting to be eaten. (murdoch, 1963, p. 185) murdoch's The Unicorn is a story of paralyzed stillness, of people who should act and do nothing, although they want to. intense fear sometimes makes us freeze RU94703_C012.indd 241 7/19/08
Hypnotic suggestion versus sensory modulation of bodily awareness
Bodily awareness arises from somatosensory, vestibular, and visual inputs but cannot be reduced t... more Bodily awareness arises from somatosensory, vestibular, and visual inputs but cannot be reduced to these incoming sensory signals. Cognitive factors are known to also impact bodily awareness, but their specific influence is poorly understood. Here we systematically compared the effects of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) manipulations on the perceived size of body parts. Toward this end, in a repeated-measures design, we sought to induce the illusion that the right index finger was elongating by vibrating the biceps tendon of the left arm whilst participants grasped the tip of their right index finger (Lackner illusion; bottom-up) and separately by hypnotic suggestion (top-down), with a sham version of the Lackner illusion as an active control condition. The effects of these manipulations were assessed with perceptual and motor tasks to capture different components of the representation of body size. We found that hypnotic suggestion significantly induced the illusion in...
The Bodyguard Hypothesis
Oxford Scholarship Online, 2017
How are the sense of ownership and the sense of agency related? Does one need to be able to contr... more How are the sense of ownership and the sense of agency related? Does one need to be able to control one’s body to experience it as one’s own? One may suggest that the sense of bodily ownership is grounded in action-orientated representations of the body. However, this agentive hypothesis cannot explain how one can experience as one’s own a rubber hand that is not under control, while not experiencing as one’s own tools that are under control. The chapter then argues that one needs to distinguish between two kinds of hot body maps: the working body map involved in instrumental actions, and the protective body map involved in self-defence. It is proposed that one experiences as one’s own the body represented in the protective body map, which represents the body that has a special significance for the evolutionary needs of the organism.
Peripersonal space
The World at Our Fingertips, 2021
Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that we process the space surrounding our body in a ... more Research in cognitive neuroscience indicates that we process the space surrounding our body in a specific way, both for protecting our body from immediate danger and for interacting with the environment. This research has direct implications for philosophical issues as diverse as self-location, sensorimotor theories of perception, and affective perception. This chapter briefly describes the overall directions that some of these discussions might take. But, beforehand, it is important to fully grasp what the notion of peripersonal space involves. One of the most difficult questions that the field has had to face these past 30 years is to define peripersonal space. Although it bears some relations to the social notion of personal space, to the sensorimotor notion of reaching space and to the spatial notion of egocentric space, there is something unique about peripersonal space and the special way we represent it. One of the main challenges is thus to offer a satisfactory definition of...
The World at Our Fingertips, 2021
A vast array of experimental results has recently shown that there is something specific in the w... more A vast array of experimental results has recently shown that there is something specific in the way we perceive the space immediately surrounding the body, also known as ‘peripersonal space’, by contrast with the perception of what lies farther away. However, we seem to have no conscious awareness of peripersonal space as being ‘special’ in any sense. Instead, we are presented with a continuous visual field without a phenomenological boundary between what is close and what is far. The computational peculiarities of peripersonal perception thus seem to have no phenomenological consequences. Here I will argue that, when you see an object in the immediate surroundings of your body, not only do you have a visual experience of the object (comparable to the experience you can have of further objects), but you also experience what you see as being here. This sense of here-ness can be conceived of as a specific type of sense of presence. To better understand it, I shall turn to illusions in...
There seems to be no dimension of bodily awareness that cannot be disrupted. To account for such ... more There seems to be no dimension of bodily awareness that cannot be disrupted. To account for such variety, there is a growing consensus that there are at least two distinct types of body representation that can be impaired, the body schema and the body image. However, the definition of these notions is often unclear. The notion of body image has attracted most controversy because of its lack of unifying positive definition. The notion of body schema, onto which there seems to be a more widespread agreement, also covers a variety of sensorimotor representations. Here, I provide a conceptual analysis of the body schema contrasting it with the body image(s) as well as assess whether (i) the body schema can be specifically impaired, while other types of body representation are preserved; and (ii) the body schema obeys principles that are different from those that apply to other types of body representation. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
arXiv (Cornell University), Mar 31, 2021
The emergence of robot-based body augmentation promises exciting innovations that will inform rob... more The emergence of robot-based body augmentation promises exciting innovations that will inform robotics, human-machine interaction, and wearable electronics. Even though augmentative devices like extra robotic arms and fingers in many ways build on restorative technologies, they introduce unique challenges for bidirectional human-machine collaboration. Can humans adapt and learn to operate a new limb collaboratively with their biological limbs without sacrificing their physical abilities? To successfully achieve robotic body augmentation, we need to ensure that by giving a person an additional (artificial) limb, we are not in fact trading off an existing (biological) one. In this manuscript, we introduce the "Neural Resource Allocation" problem, which distinguishes body augmentation from existing robotics paradigms such as teleoperation and prosthetics. We discuss how to allow
Multimodal Unity and Multimodal Binding
The MIT Press eBooks, Nov 28, 2014
The Journal of Philosophy, 2021
In this paper, I give an account of a hitherto neglected kind of 'here', which does not work as a... more In this paper, I give an account of a hitherto neglected kind of 'here', which does not work as an intentional indexical. Instead, it automatically refers to the immediate perceptual environment of the subject's body, which is known as peripersonal space. In between the self and the external world, there is something like a buffer zone, a place in which objects and events have a unique immediate significance for the subject because they may soon be in contact with her. I argue that seeing objects as being here in a minimal sense means seeing them in the place in which the perceptual system expects the world and the body to collide. I further argue that this minimal notion of here-content gives rise to a tactile sense of presence. It provides a unique experiential access to the reality of the seen object by making us aware of its ability to have an effect on us.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Dec 16, 2014
At first sight, pain seems intimately related to bodily care. Intuitively, one might say that one... more At first sight, pain seems intimately related to bodily care. Intuitively, one might say that one wants to avoid pain because one cares about one's body. Individuals who do not experience pain as unpleasant and to be avoided, like patients with pain asymbolia, seem not to care about their body. This view has been recently defended by Bain (2014) and Klein (forthcoming). In their view, one needs to care about one's body for pain to have motivational force. But does one need to care about one's body qua one's own? Or does one merely need to care about the body that happens to be one's own? In this paper, I will consider various interpretations of the notion of bodily care in light of a series of pathological cases in which patients report pain in a body part that they do not experience as of their own. These cases are problematic if one adopts a first-personal interpretation of bodily care, according to which pain requires one to care about what is represented as one's own body. The objection can run as follows. If the patients experience the body part as alien, then they should not care about it. Therefore, they should be similar to patients with pain asymbolia. But they are not. Hence, bodily care is not necessary to pain. To resist this conclusion, one can try to revise the interpretation of the notion of bodily care and offer alternative interpretations that are not first-personal. However, I will show that that those alternatives also fail to account for these borderline cases of pain.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2008
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Papers by Frederique de Vignemont